Throckmorton Part 11

"My dear, nothing short of an explosion would wake him."

Mrs. Temple wisely refrained from tormenting Judith with questions. Her fainting-fit was certainly unaccountable, but Mrs. Temple remembered once or twice in her own early days when she had done the same thing. So she merely gave Judith some brandy-and-water, and in a few minutes, with Delilah's help, got her on the old-fas.h.i.+oned sofa.

While Mrs. Temple and Delilah were stirring about the room, shutting up for the night and raking the fire down, Freke came up to Judith. Revenge was familiar to him, but not revenge on women, and remorse was altogether new to him.

"What I told you," he began, awkwardly, "the facts in the case--"

"Say no more about it; I don't believe you!" answered Judith in a low voice, but scornful beyond description.

Freke's rage blazed up under that tone.

"You don't believe me? Then I'll make Throckmorton tell you himself. I can find it out from him without his suspecting it, and I'll make him tell you how he killed your husband."

Judith drew back and gave him a look that was equivalent to a slap in the face. Just then Mrs. Temple and Delilah went out into the hall to make fast the door.

"Well, then, if by any accident you have told me the truth, it was the fortune of war--"

"Yes, but the hand that killed your husband! Ah! do you think I don't see it all--all--all--not only what has happened, but what is happening now?"

Judith rose slowly from her sofa, forgetting her weakness. At that moment Freke thought he had never seen her look so handsome. Her eyes, usually a soft, dark gray, were black with indignation; her cheeks burned; she looked capable of killing him where he stood. She opened her lips once or twice to speak, but no sound came. She had no words to express what she felt at that moment. Freke felt a sensation of triumph.

At last he had brought this proud spirit to book; and Throckmorton--at least if she scorned himself, Freke--she was forever out of Throckmorton's reach. There was a gulf between them now that nothing on earth could bridge over. He stood in a calm and easy att.i.tude, his face only less expressive than Judith's. n.o.body who saw Freke then could say, as Mrs. Temple sometimes had said, "What is there so interesting in Freke's face?" It was full of power and pa.s.sion.

It seemed an age to each as they stood there, but it was really only a few moments. Mrs. Temple and Delilah came back. Judith nodded to Freke, and walked off, disdaining Delilah's arm. She felt pride in showing him her strength and composure. She even glanced back at him, and gave him a smile from her pale lips.

"You have a spirit like a man!" he cried after her, involuntarily. Mrs.

Temple thought he meant because Judith had rallied so quickly from her fainting-fit.

"Rather a spirit like a woman!" answered Judith, in a loud, clear voice, as she went up the stairs.

It was some little time before she could get rid of Mrs. Temple and Delilah. But presently the door was locked, and she was alone.

Some power beyond her will drew her steps to the window that looked toward Millenbeck. The moon had gone down, and a few clouds scurried across the pale immensity of the sky, whipped by the winds of night.

There was enough of the ghastly half-light to distinguish the dark ma.s.ses of the trees and even the outline of the Millenbeck house. From the window which she knew well enough belonged to Throckmorton's own den the cheerful light still streamed. He was sitting there, reading and smoking, no doubt. She could imagine exactly how he looked. His face, when he was silent, was rather stern, which made the charm of his smile and his words more captivating by contrast. And what horror she ought to feel of this man!--for, in spite of that first involuntary protest that she did not believe Freke, the heart-breaking conviction came to her every moment that he was telling the truth. But did she feel horror and hatred of Throckmorton? Ah! no. And when she tried to think of Beverley, the feeling that he was dead; that he would trouble her no more; that he was forever gone out of her life, filled her with something that was frightfully like joy.

But when she remembered that an open grave lay between her and Throckmorton, it was not something like anguish she felt--it was anguish itself. Here was a man she might have loved--a man infinitely worthy of love--this much she acknowledged to herself; and yet Fate had married her to a man she never could have loved. For at that moment she saw as by a flash of lightning the falseness of her marriage and her widowhood.

She dared not think any longer; she could only throw herself on her bed, and try and stifle among the pillows her sobs and cries. And, remembering Beverley and Throckmorton and Freke, and his words to her that night, this gentle and soft-hearted creature sounded all the depths of grief, love, shame, hatred. She tried to pray, but her prayers--if prayers they could be called--were mere outcries against the inexorable and unpitying G.o.d. "Dear Lord, what have I done to thee that I should suffer so?"

The night wore on, the candles burned out, the fire was a mere red glow of embers. Anguish and despair, like other pa.s.sions, spend themselves.

Judith had ceased to weep, and lay on her bed with a sort of icy torpor upon her. Little Beverley, who rarely stirred in his sleep, waked up and called for his mother; but even the child's voice had no power to move her. The little boy, finding himself unnoticed, crawled out of his small bed and came to his mother's side. The sound of his baby voice, the touch of his little warm, moist hands, awakened something like remorse in her. She tried to help him up on the bed, but her arms fell helplessly--she, this strong young woman, was as weak as a child with the conflict of emotions. The boy, however--a st.u.r.dy little fellow--climbed up alone and nestled to her. She covered him up and held him close to her, and kissed him coldly once or twice. "My child, he killed your father," she said to him, thinking of Throckmorton, and that perhaps, for the child's sake, she might arouse some feeble spark of regret for the father--some dutiful hatred of Throckmorton. But she could do neither the one nor the other.

At last, as a wet, miserable, gloomy dawn approached, she fell into a wretched sleep. Judith's unexpected fainting-fit was a very good excuse for her keeping her room for a day or two--a merciful provision for her, as, along with other new experiences, she found for the first time that her soul was stronger than her body, and that grief had made her ill.

She expected, in all those wretched hours that she lay in her darkened room, that every time the door opened it would be Mrs. Temple coming with a ghastly face to tell her the dreadful thing that Freke knew; and the mere apprehension made her heart stand still. She, this candid and sincere woman, rehea.r.s.ed to herself the very words and tones that she would express a grief and horror she did not feel. But when several days pa.s.sed, and the explosion did not come, she concluded that Freke, for his own reasons, meant to keep it to himself.

For Freke's part, he had no intention of telling anybody except Judith. He had no mind to bring about the storm that would follow his revelation. He meant to show Judith that gulf between Throckmorton and herself, and that was all. He would have been unfeignedly sorry had the hospitable doors of Millenbeck been no longer open to him.

When Judith came down-stairs, he felt a great curiosity to know how she would meet him. He himself was perfectly easy and natural in his manner to her; and she, to his enforced admiration, was equally self-possessed with him, although she could not always control the expression of her eyes. "What a Spartan she is!" thought Freke to himself. "She could die of grief and chagrin with a smile on her lips, and with her voice as smooth and musical as the velvet wind of summer."

CHAPTER VII.

The autumn crept on. Freke had gone to Wareham, to Judith's delight, but she found that she had rejoiced too soon, for he was at Barn Elms nearly every day. The still, silent enmity between Judith and himself showed itself, on her part, by a certain fine scorn--an almost imperceptible raising of her narrow brows, that was infuriating to Freke. Still, he could not shake her self-possession. She even listened to his talk, and to his captivating violin-playing, with a cool and critical pleasure.

When, as often happened, his step was heard in the hall at twilight, and he would walk into the drawing-room or the dining-room, as if Barn Elms were his home, with his violin in his hand--for he kept one at Barn Elms--and seating himself would begin to play in his masterly way, Judith would listen as closely as Jacqueline. But the spell was merely the spell of the music. She could listen to the celestial thrilling of the strings, the soft lamenting, without in the slightest degree succ.u.mbing to the player--not even when Freke, playing a wandering accompaniment, like another air from the one he was singing, would sing some of Heine's sea-songs, in which she could almost hear the sound of the wind as it rose and wailed and died upon the waves. When the music stopped, and Freke would look at her piercingly, she was no more moved by it emotionally than General Temple was, who p.r.o.nounced it "uncommon fine fiddling, by George! Some of the tunes haven't got much tune, though." This unbroken resistance on Judith's part piqued Freke immeasurably; but quite naturally, as it often is with men of his temperament, as he could not please her, he determined to spite her--and he did it by a silent, furtive courts.h.i.+p of Jacqueline. Of this, neither General nor Mrs. Temple suspected anything. In one sense, the girl had suffered from neglect. Beverley had been the favorite of both parents.

He had been the conventional good son, the comfort of his parents'

hearts, while Jacqueline was more or less of a puzzle to both of them.

In vain Mrs. Temple tried to interest her in household affairs; Jacqueline would have none of them. She shocked and mystified her mother by saying that she hated Barn Elms--it was so old and shabby, and there were not enough carpets and curtains in the house; and the hair-cloth furniture in the drawing-room made her ill. Mrs. Temple, who excelled in all sweet, feminine virtues, who would have loved and bettered any home given her, thought this sort of thing on Jacqueline's part very depraved. The mother and the daughter did not understand each other, and could not. Judith's superior intelligence here came in. Jacqueline loved her, and, while she obeyed her mother from sheer force of will on Mrs. Temple's part, she rebelled against being influenced by her. Judith, on the contrary, without a particle of authority over Jacqueline, could do anything she wished with her. Mrs. Temple could only command and be obeyed in outward things, but Judith ruled Jacqueline's inner soul more than anybody else.

The county people, outside of the Severn neighborhood, still held perfectly aloof from Throckmorton. This angered him somewhat, although, as a matter of fact, the people who did recognize him supplied him with all the company he wanted; for Throckmorton was always enough for himself, and depended upon no man and no woman for his content. He had bought Millenbeck and come there for a year, and a year he would stay, no matter what the Carters and the Carringtons and the Randolphs thought about it. Then he really had enough of company, and all the books and cigars he wanted, and plenty of the finest shooting, although he never killed a robin after that absurd promise he made to Jacqueline, but he never saw one without giving a thought to her and a grim smile at himself. And so the quiet autumn slipped away. Throckmorton felt every day the charm of exquisite repose. In his life he had known a good deal of excitement--the four years of the war he had been in active service all the time--and this return to quiet and a sort of refined primitiveness pleased him. He was charmed with the simplicity of the people at Barn Elms--the simplicity of genuine country people, whose outlook is upon nature. He had often heard that country people never were really sophisticated, and he began to believe it. Even in the stirrings of his own heart toward the place of his boyhood, after the lapse of so many busy and exciting years, he recognized the spell that Nature lays softly upon those whose young eyes have seen nothing but her. Throckmorton, in spite of a certain firmness that was almost hardness, was at heart a sentimentalist. He found content, pleasure, and interest in this lazy, dreamy life. Of happiness he had discovered that, except during that early married life of his, he had none, for he was too wise to confound peace and happiness. At forty-four, when his dark hair had turned quite gray, he acknowledged to himself that nothing deserved the name of happiness but love. But all these dreams and fancies he kept to himself, and revolved chiefly in his mind when he was tramping along the country roads with a gun over his shoulder, or stretched before a blazing wood-fire in the library at Millenbeck smoking strong cigars by the dozen. He managed to keep his sentimentalism well out of sight, not because he was ashamed of it, but because he respected it.

Freke was a positive acquisition to him. Throckmorton had that sort of broad, masculine tolerance that can find excuses for everything a man may do except cheating at cards. Freke came constantly to Millenbeck, much oftener than Throckmorton went to Wareham.

Millenbeck, though, was a pleasant place to visit. Throckmorton had left the restoration and fitting up of the place to people who understood their business well; and consequently, when he arrived, he found he had one of the most comfortable, if not luxurious, country-houses that could be imagined. His fortune, which at the North would have been nothing more than a handsome competence, was a superb patrimony in the ruined Virginia, and with ready money and Sweeney anybody could be comfortable, Throckmorton thought. The Rev. Edmund Morford also gave him much of his (Morford's) company, and obtained a vast number of household receipts and learned many contrivances for domestic comfort from Sweeney.

"Be jabers, the parson's more of an ould woman than mesilf," Sweeney would remark to his colored coadjutors. "He can make as good white gravy as any she-cook going, and counts his sheets and towels every week as reg'lar as the mother of him did, I warrant," which was quite true.

But the parson's good heart outweighed his innocent conceit and his effeminate beauty with Throckmorton. Morford tried conscientiously to get Throckmorton into the church, but with ill success.

"Sink the parson, Morford," Throckmorton would laugh. "Perhaps I'll get married some day, and my wife will pray me into heaven, like most of the men who get there, I suspect."

Nevertheless Throckmorton had a reverent soul, and, although he would have turned pale and have been constrained by an iron silence had he got up and tried to open his mouth on the subject of the inscrutable problems that Morford attacked with such glib self-sufficiency, he revered religion and did not scoff even at the callowest form of it.

Both Jack and himself got to going over to Barn Elms often; Throckmorton, however, being an old bird, exercised considerable wariness, so as not to collide with Jack at these times. Jack keptup a continual fire from ambush at his father, regarding which of the young women at Barn Elms the major would eventually capitulate to; but Throckmorton treated this with the dignified silence that was the only weapon against Jack's sly rallying. As for General Temple, he regarded all of Throckmorton's visits as particularly directed toward himself, for the purpose of acquiring military knowledge; and Throckmorton heard more of the theory of war from General Temple at this time than he ever heard in all his life before. While the general, who had all campaigns, modern and ancient, at his finger-ends, declaimed with sonorous confidence on the mistakes of Hannibal, Caesar, Scipio, and other well-known military characters, Throckmorton listened meekly, seldom venturing an observation. General Temple indicated a faint surprise that Throckmorton, during his career, had never undergone any of the thrilling adventures which had actually happened to General Temple, who would have been a great soldier after the pattern of Brian de Bois Guilbert; nor could Throckmorton convince him that he, Throckmorton, conceived it his duty to stay with his men, and considered unnecessary seeking of danger as unsoldier-like in the highest degree. Throckmorton, however, did not argue the point. In place of General Temple's innumerable and real hair-breadth escapes, and horses shot under him, Throckmorton could only say that the solitary physical injury he received during the war was a bad rheumaticky arm from sleeping in the wet, and a troublesome attack of measles caught by visiting his men in the hospital. But General Temple knew that Throckmorton had been mentioned half a dozen times in general orders, and had got several brevets, while General Temple had narrowly missed half a dozen courts-martial for being where he didn't belong at a critical time. The fact that he was in imminent personal danger on all these occasions, General Temple considered not only an ample excuse, but quite a feather in his cap.

Occasionally, though (during the general's disquisitions), Throckmorton's eye would seek Judith's as she sat under the lamp, with a piece of delicate embroidery in her hand, st.i.tching demurely, and something like a smile would pa.s.s between them. Judith understood the joke. The mingled softness and archness of her glance was very beautiful to Throckmorton, but it had not the power over him of Jacqueline's coquettish air. Throckmorton was rather vexed at the charm this kittenish young thing cast over him. He had always professed a great aversion to young fools, who invariably turn into old bores, but he could not deny that he was more drawn to sit near Jacqueline in her low chair, than to Judith sitting gracefully upright under the lamp. That Jacqueline was not far off from folly, he was forced to admit to himself every time he talked with her, but the admission brought with it a slight pang. Then he never lost sight of the disparity in their years; and this was painful because of the secret attraction he felt for her.

Sometimes, walking home from Barn Elms, across the fields in autumn nights, he would find himself comparing the two women, and wis.h.i.+ng that the older woman possessed for him the subtle charm of the younger one.

Any man might love Judith Temple--she was so gentle, so unconscious of her own superiority to the average woman, so winning upon one's reason and self-respect--and then Throckmorton would sigh, and stride faster along the path in the wintry darkness. Suppose--suppose he should seriously try to win Jacqueline? How long would he be happy? And what sort of a life would it be for her, with that childish restlessness and inability to depend for one moment on herself? And Throckmorton knew instinctively that, although he possessed great power in bending women to his will, it was not in him to adapt himself to any woman. He might love her, indulge her, adore her, but he could not change his fixed and immutable character one iota. It would be a peculiar madness for him to marry any woman who did not possess adaptability in a high degree; and this Throckmorton had known, ever since he had grown hair on his face, went only with a certain mental force and breadth in women. He had the whole theory mapped out, that the more intellectual a man was, the less adaptable he was, while with women the converse was strikingly true--the more intellectual a woman was, the more adaptable she was. He also knew perfectly well that in women the emotions and the intellect are so inextricably involved that a woman's emotional range was exactly limited by her intellectual range; that there is nothing more commonplace in a commonplace woman than her emotions. Nay, more. He remembered Dr.

Johnson's thundering against female fools: "Sir, a man usually marries a fool, with the expectation of ruling her; but the fool, sir, invariably rules the man." But all this went to pieces when he saw Jacqueline. She was to him as if a figure of Youth had stepped out of a white Greek frieze; and whenever he realized this charm of hers, he sighed to himself profoundly.

People are never too old or too sensible to commit follies, but people of sense and experience suffer the misery of knowing all about their follies when they do commit them.

To Freke, who was incomparably the keenest observer in all this little circle, the whole thing was a psychic study of great interest. He had the art in a singular degree of getting outside of his own emotions; and the fact that he had been guilty of the egregious folly of falling in love with Judith at first sight made him only keener in studying out the situation. He took an abstract pleasure in partly confiding his discoveries to Mrs. Sherrard, who was a bold woman, and had become an out-and-out partisan of his--the only one he could count on, except Jacqueline, under the rose. It was a subject of active concern why Freke ever bought Wareham in the beginning, and still more so why he should continue to stay there. When pressed on the subject by Mrs.

Sherrard--they were sitting in the comfortable drawing-room at Turkey Thicket, the blazing wood-fire making the dull wintry afternoon, and the flat, monotonous landscape outside more dreary by contrast--Freke declared that he had settled in the country in order to cultivate the domestic virtues to advantage.

"Pooh!" said Mrs. Sherrard.

Freke then hinted at a possibility of his marrying, which, considering his divorced condition, gave Mrs. Sherrard a thrill of horror. He saw in an instant that this divorce question was one upon which Mrs. Sherrard's prejudices, like those of everybody else in the county, were adamantine, and not to be trifled with; so he dropped the obnoxious subject promptly and wisely.

"The fact is," he said, standing up with his back to the fire, and causing Mrs. Sherrard to notice how excellent was his slight but well-knit figure, "I've got to live somewhere, and why not here? I don't know whether I've got anything left of my money or not--anything, that is, that my creditors or my lawyers will let me have in peace--but there's excellent shooting on the place, and it only cost a song. I think I can stay here as long as I can stay anywhere; you know I am a sort of civilized Bedouin anyhow. And then I own up to a desire to see that little comedy between--between--Millenbeck and Barn Elms played through. It's an amusing little piece."

Mrs. Sherrard p.r.i.c.ked up her ears. Freke's reputation as a conquering hero had inspired in her the interest it always does in the female breast. Was it possible that he shouldn't be making love to either Judith or Jacqueline?

"I'll tell you what," he cried, smiling, "they are the most precious pack of innocents at Barn Elms! There's my uncle--a high-minded, good-natured, unterrified old blunderbuss--the most unsophisticated of the lot. Then my aunt, who belongs properly to the age of Rowena and Rebecca--and Judith."

Here Freke's countenance changed a little from its laughing carelessness. His rather ordinary features were full of a piercing and subtile expression.

"Judith fancies, because she has been a wife, a mother, and a widow, that she knows the whole gamut of life, when actually she has only struck the first note correctly a little while ago--no, I forget--that young one. But that's very one-sided, although intense. She loves the child because he is her own, not because he is Beverley's--rather in spite of it, I fancy."

Mrs. Sherrard, in the excitement of the moment--for what is more exciting than unexpected and inside discoveries about our neighbors?--got up too.